Spellbound
by Nostalgia

Then one day the magic stopped working, and Harry was a normal kid. Teenager. Adult. The years have flown by and in his hopeful moments he still expects the magic to come back.

He teaches chemistry at Hogwarts, and no one seems to remember that the school once specialised in other, far more terrifying things. After hours he trains the under-15s football team and thinks of flying over the field so many years ago.

Whatever happened, there's no going back -- science couldn't have taken the spells, and magic falls flat whenever he tries. He trawls around cities on weekends, rummaging through shops full of black- clad teenagers in the hope of finding something that still works the way it used to. He has subscriptions to Fortean Times and the Weekly World News: you never know.

Some mornings he wakes up convinced that he had what would pass as a normal childhood, but when he wipes the grains of sleep from his eyes the old world comes back to him. He wonders if he is changing too, so many years after the rest of the world.

He reads books on quantum physics and superstring theory -- the cutting edge of physics is as close as he can get to magic these days. It's a fragment of reality that where the normal rules don't seem to apply, and he takes comfort in the unanswered questions.

It started when he went to potions class and found himself confronted with enzymes. He knew it wasn't right, but no one would listen to him. They almost locked him away until he got the message and claimed it all as an elaborate practical joke. The school kept him on, got him weekly appointments with an NHS counsellor. He learned the rules of this new world, and managed to live on the eccentric side of normal. He passed his A-levels with higher grades than he should have, and went off to Birmingham to study chemistry and education. At the age of 26 he found himself back at Hogwarts, clutching to the belief that if he stayed close to the place where he had studied magic things might go back to normal. Or paranormal, as they'd call it now.

But now he knows that this will never happen. He will remain lost in a world he was allegedly born into. He will be the only remnant of a lost reality.

If the magic still worked, he would make himself forget the way things used to be.

 

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